Corporations are spending their tax cuts - on themselves

Remember last year when Donald Trump and his congressional Trumpeteers bragged that their â€śyugeâ€ť tax cut for corporations would spark a â€śyugeâ€ť corporate spending spree to create new jobs and higher wages?

Well, just as they promised, weâ€™re now seeing corporate chieftains spending wildly - on themselves, not on boosting Americaâ€™s economy.

Mainly, theyâ€™re pouring billions into a self-serving scheme called â€śbuybacksâ€ť - buying up shares of their own corporationâ€™s stock. Google executives, for example, are spending $8.6 billion from their taxpayer bonanza on buybacks, PepsiCo is in for $15 billion, and Apple for $30 billion.

Why? Because reducing the total number of shares on the market increases the value of each remaining share, giving those lucky shareholders a bigger piece of the companyâ€™s profit pie. Yes, less magically means more!

But itâ€™s not magic, itâ€™s manipulation. And the top executives doing the manipulating are primary beneficiaries, since most of their pay comes in the form of millions of dollarsâ€™ worth of their corporationâ€™s stock.

If Trump and the GOP Congress had really intended their trillion-dollar giveaway of the peopleâ€™s tax revenue be spent for the benefit of all, they wouldâ€™ve required the corporate recipients to plow the bulk of the money into our nationâ€™s grassroots economy.

Instead, once again, our corrupt political officials duped taxpayers into giving away public funds in the name of workers. But they actually stiffed workers, enriched CEOs, increased inequality, and diverted tax dollars from urgent national needs - and enabled corporate powers to donate even more corrupting campaign cash to the politicians and party doing this to us.

In other words, the Trump tax scam worked just as the GOP intended.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. Distributed by OtherWords.org.